City's tough year has it feeling blue

November 18, 2009|By Mary Schmich

Chicago has a mood problem.

It seems edgy lately, a little sullen and scared, verging on depressed. Some days, it feels more like the angry, confused place I moved to in 1985 than the exuberant city that has swaggered through the past two decades.

This is a subjective assessment, I know. No mood ring exists to test whether a city is rosy or blue, happy or sad.

But cities, like people, do have moods, and if you live here, don't you feel it? A collective shift toward a darker frame of mind that can't be chalked up entirely to winter or the national recession?

The death of Michael Scott, president of the Chicago Board of Education, is the latest blow to the city's psyche.

Scott's body and a gun were found at 3 a.m. Monday on the edge of the cold Chicago River downtown. Whether it was suicide (as the medical examiner says) or murder (as the noir theorists imagine), the violent death of a man eulogized as one of our civic fathers comes as another assault on the collective well-being of a city that has taken a lot of punches recently to its heart and pride.

Think about the past year:

Chicago resident Rod Blagojevich is indicted and kicked out of the governor's office. His close friend, Chris Kelly, days away from prison, dies of an overdose of pain medication. Fenger High School students beat a fellow student to death. Chicago's Olympic bid fails.

There's more:

The city plots to sell its assets to solve its budget crunch. In the past week, two big trade shows pull out of McCormick Place. The jobless can't find jobs.

Meanwhile, our sports teams haven't done one of the things they exist to do, which is to give the citizens a reason to feel victorious even when other things go wrong.

Chicago isn't suffering a full-blown crisis of confidence. Not yet. But the undercurrent of uneasiness feels as real as the newly empty storefronts in my neighborhood.

Chicago was an uneasy place when I moved here in the mid-1980s. It was dirty, segregated, openly racist. The steel mills were dying, and with them a piece of Chicago's identity. It was a city in transition.

But through the 1990s, Chicago, by many vital measures, got better. In 1996, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention here, a front-page Wall Street Journal article began, "This is America's urban paradise. Don't laugh."

The headline said, "Second Wind: Despite Tough Years, Chicago Has Become a Nice Place to Live -- A Strong Economy Has Led the Renaissance, Schools Are Opening on Schedule."

In the years since then, Chicago has ridden the momentum. It's made big plans, been boosted by big names. Mayor Richard Daley. Oprah Winfrey. Barack Obama.

Now Daley's grip on power is loosened. Oprah is repeatedly rumored to be leaving. President Obama lives somewhere else, and the glow his election brought to Chicago has waned.

The city seems stalled. When it's hard to see what's next and who'll lead us there, bad news feels even worse.

Chicago is still a place of beauty and bounty, and the problems aren't entirely new. Violence, corruption, the personal struggles of individuals are always part of city life.

But there is a shift going on in Chicago, a new uneasiness. And the moods of a city, like the moods of a person, need to be acknowledged before they can be fixed.